Happier times, the day I bought her.

I play it back in my head and wondered the “what ifs” but in the end, it’s no one’s fault but the deer. I had been at my parents’ house in Brodhead the evening of Friday, May 12th, for a pre-Mothers Day dinner, but I had wanted to get to Wauwatosa for the weekend. So, I opted for a midnight drive from Brodhead to Tosa, something I’ve done many times before. It had been a beautiful afternoon and I drove from Madison to Brodhead with the music blaring and the T-Tops off. I took my mom to dinner in the Camaro (dad drove mom’s car separately since she was on call for the clinic, and the Camaro is so low to the ground that tall folks like my dad have trouble getting into it) and had a great evening.

70 miles an hour is the new speed limit on most Wisconsin highways now, and that’s exactly what I was doing at 12:38AM outside of East Troy, Wisconsin, in the rightmost lane of the 4 lane median-divided highway. The deer caught the car directly on the drivers side headlight with a muffled WHUMP, smashing the car’s ABS plastic around the wheel down into the wheel itself milliseconds before I could jam on the brakes. Those milliseconds of 3 wheels turning and one wheel stopped was all it took to wrench me around in a sweet 180 degree loop, across the left northbound lane, and then sliding crazily sideways down the graded median into the grass filled ditch that until moments earlier, the fatal deer had been chowing down in.

I switched the car off. I felt fine. No glass was broken at all. The impact hadn’t felt serious at all to me. So I got out, took a deep breath, and went to look at the front of the car.

Deer are apparently harder than I thought

I called the State Farm accident number and told them I’d hit a deer. I was assured that since no one else’s property but my own was involved, I’d only be out the $500 deductible and they’d take care of the rest. Heartened by this, I walked up the slippery, wet slope in my own tire tracks and looked at the deer. It wasn’t moving – not very much blood though. Although I didn’t touch it to check I’m pretty sure it died instantly of having every bone in its neck broken. Poor thing – why’d you have to be eating at 1AM? Why couldn’t you have been in Deer Bed over in the forest, away from the roads?

About five different cars stopped to check on me while I was waiting for the tow truck to arrive. That was gratifying. Two guys with trucks even offered to pull me up out of the ditch but I assured them that I’d rather let the professionals, paid by my insurance company, assess the collision results exactly as they lay. A sheriff stopped by briefly, told me that it wasn’t his jurisdiction and he couldn’t stay, but that he’d radio for a guy who patrolled this area. That sheriff, an Officer Johnson, arrived fifteen minutes later and filled out the accident form (in case State Farm needed an officer’s opinion of the situation) while we waited another fifteen minutes for the tow truck to arrive. Johnson sympathized with me heartily – he was a young looking guy, maybe five years older than me, and he told me that this was the 3rd deer collision in 3 nights he’d seen. “Young pregnant females, they need to eat so much more food than usual, that they go down into the tall grass between the north and southbound roads where all the water flows – and they’re jittery and jumpy because they’re young. Not your fault.”

The tow truck operator, Kyle, and Johnson appraised the front end damage. Both seemed impressed – “huh, a newer car would have crumpled a lot more. These older GM cars; they can take a hit like a champ.” I told them I’d barely even felt the hit; it was like hitting a raccoon. Obviously the impact force was enough to fling me off the road and I could respect that, but the damage still looked a lot worse than it had felt. The deer had essentially liquefied one of my custom headlights I’d installed two summers ago; there wasn’t a single piece of it left except the wires, dangling uselessly like an ocular nerve. And the front “nose” of the car had been mildly damaged and replaced two and a half years ago. I found it ironic that the newest parts of the car were the most visibly damaged.

Kyle pulled the car out of the ditch slowly with his winch cable, and told me that State Farm had authorized him to take the car wherever I wanted at their expense. Nice of them – so I picked Sparkle Auto Body, who had done all the previous body work on the car before. 55 miles away – is that okay? No problem at all, I was told – I’ll deliver it to them right now. Johnson offered to drop me off at a nearby 24-hour Walmart, where Christine could pick me up. I sat on the uncomfortable hard plastic seats of his squad car, watching the yellow flashing lights of the tow truck disappear into the distance. I’d see her again, I told myself. State Farm told me I’d just need to pay that $500 deductible and Sparkle Auto Body does great work; she’d be as good as new – probably better.

Unfortunately….that wouldn’t be the case. When I bicycled over to Sparkle on Monday to see how the car looked in the daylight, they told me there’d be a good chance State Farm would have to declare her a Total Loss. Sparkle was estimating the damages at $6,000 – and 15 year old, 2002 V6 Camaroes just aren’t worth that kind of money, even if replacement parts were easy to find for them – which they are not. Between the obvious damage to 3-4 separate parts of the body that would require complete replacement and repainting, the warned me that the sliding down the hill sideways might have done all kinds of other possible damage to her suspension and frame that wasn’t as easy to see.

The call I’d been expecting but dreading came on Wednesday – a nice valuation on the part of State Farm though; instead of taking the Blue Book value of $1700 for the car, they actually did some research on the prices 2002 Camaroes were selling for in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa, and offered me a check based on that value, which was substantially more. Heck, if I wanted to I could go out to Plymouth, Wisconsin and buy me an identical Camaro the next day, if I wanted! So…props to State Farm for treating a customer right. I don’t hold it against them for Totalling the car; insurance is a numbers game and the numbers just weren’t in her favor. It was close though, from what I found out – if the damage had been only $800-1200 less, it might have been under the red line. But “what ifs” don’t get anyone anywhere. What if I’d decided to just spend the night in Brodhead? What if I’d stopped for coffee at a gas station on the way? ….What if she hadn’t been so well built, and I had died or been seriously injured in the crash, instead of barely feeling the impact? What ifs are pointless to dwell on.

Props also go to Sparkle Auto Body, who put the car up on their lift and quickly removed the aftermarket hitch from the car for free when I asked if they’d help me out. They’ll be removing the license plates for me later today as well. Christine took me over to the Sparkle lot yesterday so I could collect my belongings out of the car and have a few final moments with her. I emptied her out, put the keys in the ignition and started her up one last time, pumping the gas while in park to hear the GMC 3800 engine roar like it did back at the Zimbrick lot in 2012. My first car! God, I loved having her. She improved my life and cheered me up to drive her, and in the end, probably saved my life as her final act. After 15 years of cruising, you deserve a rest.

Just like back in 2012

You’ll see all your old Camaro buddies from the assembly line! Where you can romp and rev…

Today marks ten years since I downloaded and installed WordPress 2.1.3 on my little corner of the internet, mostly to give my parents a means of checking up on me when I took my summer trip to the United Kingdom later in the month of May. My first blog post was the equivalent of “Hello World” and very few people know or remember that very briefly, this blog briefly occupied a /blog subfolder instead of the place of honor at the top of the domain. At that point I thought the website might serve as a repository for a CV and other documents, and I didn’t know if I wanted to commit to what I thought of as a bland, boring “every page on the internet is a damned wordpress blog!” look. It would be a year before I’d scrap that original, now forgotten, look and commit wholly to WordPress.

The blog served me well for my two years of living in Jordan, and it definitely doesn’t get updated as much anymore (except for navel-gazing, like to celebrate having basic web security or to commemorate a decade of its own existence, geez that’s corny), but perhaps I’ll have some exciting news to share next week.

It’s hard to believe HeiseHeise.com has been on the Internet since May 2007 – I know, I have the bills from 1and1.com to prove it! Hard to believe I’ve been going to places like Jordan, China, and India and logging right into the admin page for the website through an HTTP connection – I might as well have been saying to the government-controlled ISP’s I was connecting through “please, take my username and password and store it for your later use!”

I might not have been nearly as technically minded a decade ago as I am now, but for the past half decade or so I’ve been wincing, or connecting to the UW’s VPN service, every time I’d log onto my website. But what else could I do? I only pay 1and1 about $3 a month for the most basic hosting plan I can get; for a long time it’s been essentially impossible to add a TLS certificate (or even the now-outdated SSL) onto shared hosting unless I had my own IP address, and no way in heck was going to pay that kind of money for a website which is basically one step above a public diary.

However, in September 2016 1and1 apparently relented and allowed all their hosting plans access to a free Symantec certificate (using SNI, a relatively new technology that allows shared sites to be able to use certificates), good for one domain (no subdomains). Thanks to this thread for showing me that while 1and1 wasn’t willing to allow 3rd party certificates on their servers (like the well known and amazing LetsEncrypt service), the final post on that page clued me into this new generosity. So yesterday, I pushed two buttons in the 1and1 admin panel to generate the new cert, then went into WordPress’s settings here on this site to change my URL from HTTP to HTTPS. Then….the site went down for the next 3-4 hours or so. Whoops. I mean, I wasn’t alarmed yet – I know it takes awhile for hosted websites to do stuff sometimes. I figured there was some sort of delay in linking the new Symantec certificate into my domain, or changing my shared hosting location from an HTTP section of 1and1 server’s to an HTTPS server (I noticed my IP address changed this morning). Then, it was a few modifications to my .htaccess file to permanently 301 redirect http://heiseheise.com to https://heiseheise.com (so from now on, you shouldn’t need to update your bookmarks; all visits to the unencrypted site will redirect here to the encrypted version) and that was that. My website gets an A rating from SSLlabs.com, and also points out that people visiting me from Internet Explorer on Windows XP won’t be able to see the website at all now (due to a lack of the aforementioned SNI technology). Good! Stop using Windows XP, people. Ugh.

But Zach, why am I still not seeing the green padlock on this site? Firefox shows me a padlock with a yellow exclamation point, and Chrome shows a circle with an “i” in it. Good question. It’s probably a combination of the plugins I use that might not support HTTPS yet, combined with the fact that all my actual blog entries until now are using HTTP for linking to the photos I host. I was hoping the htaccess modification would automatically rewrite the code on the fly but it looks like that’s too much to hope for. Perhaps I’ll go back and change the links in the blog entries to go to https, but considering that when you actually do click on the pictures they take you to the HTTPS version, I’m not overly worried. And besides, the main thing is that the admin pages of WordPress are now 100% secure (check out https://heiseheise.com/blog/wp-admin to see the green padlock we all know and love) so I’m no longer worried about my credentials getting hoovered up by any governments or ISP’s I might have to interact with over the course of my travels. Time to change those passwords, by the way!

Wow, this guy really knows how to have an exciting Saturday night

I had some free time this evening so was finally able to get around to getting some nice pictures from my Panasonic LX-5 uploaded to the blog. Every single article has had the weird mobile-app caused formatting fixed, I’ve corrected a lot of typos that not having a spell checker running caused, and most importantly, no less than 40 new photos have been added in total, usually at least 3-4 onto every entry from the trip. Please feel free to scroll back and check ’em out! You can view the posts in the correct order (starting with the end of December) at this link – http://www.heiseheise.com/category/travel/tanzania?order=asc

We blended quite well in Abu Dhabi

After the unpleasant circumstances of my prior blog post, it was nice to meet a friendly face back in DAR. Our hotel, Triniti, was staffed by a pleasant Zambian employee named Xavier. In case you didn’t know, Zambia is one of those African countries that’s adopted English as their native language, so our apologies about our lateness (due to cancelled and rebooked flights) were met with complete understanding and sympathy, without a language barrier in the way. Xavier gave us free water, on the house, and also waived the $5 airport transfer fee to get us back to the DAR airport the next day for our flight to Abu Dhabi. Bottom line – Triniti Airport Hotel, a 5 minute drive from the airport: highly recommended by us.

Being back in the Arab world, if only for 12 hours, was something I’d been looking forward to. In my two years of living in Jordan, I’ve never once been to the Gulf Countries, and I’d always been curious about them. My sole interaction with “Khaleejees” as Jordanians called them, was usually with speeding, honking, black SUVs with stone-faced men driving groups of fully covered women in them. As a Wisconsinite, they reminded us about our friendly jokes about Illinois folks – rich southern neighbors who come north to buy all the good land and can’t drive properly. Haha! Just some good natured ribbing, my dear Illinois friends.

Anyway, Abu Dhabi was….weird. No one spoke Arabic. Almost no one we interacted with, was an Arab. All of our taxi drivers were Pakistani, the grocery store staff were Filipino, and the hotel staff were a Malaysian and a Moroccan, who admitted that he knew a bit of Arabic but of course mostly spoke Berber.

One taxi driver, a handsome young Pakistani with a wry tone named Omer, explained that Abu Dhabi was like Las Vegas for the Arabs. They don’t live here, he said. They’re all in Sydney or in other countries. They come back occasionally to drive their Mercedes, Corvettes, and motorcycles in a country they can treat as their playground. All of us foreigners, he pointed out, just keep the place running for them as they jetset around. He said he’d just arrived in the country three months ago, looking for well paying work – hopefully not as a taxi driver for long; he had several accounting degrees and was just paying the bills while looking for a real job. He said it was too expensive to live anywhere close to Abu Dhabi itself; he had to drive 100 kilometers from a village of 4,000 people every morning – it was all he could afford the rent for.

We donned our Arabic robes, carefully packed away in our suitcases for the past two weeks in anticipation of this moment, and went out on the town, or tried at least. The city seemed basically dead – despite the incredible cool and calm winter weather – almost no one was on the streets but a few joggers and the occasional Arab in a robe walking about, usually on their phones. I tried to speak some Arabic, but was usually met with blank, apologetic stares. There were no restaurants on the street – due to restrictive liquor laws, only hotels had them, and they were mostly closed by 11 or so, even though it was a weekend night.

Our restaurant plans stymied, we ended up at a Carrefour grocery store at 12:50am, with it closing at 1am, frantically searching the aisles for a package of tortellini and some tomato sauce to make in our hotel room, which had a stovetop in it. It wasn’t how we had planned our return to the Arab world – in Abu Dhabi’s defense, we were rushed and had no internet apart from what we looked up in our hotel room ahead of time. Moral of the story – carefully plan your night plans while in Abu Dhabi, otherwise you’ll be glumly eating tortellini out of a pot at 2am.

“Hmm, which of these assorted cheeses should I eat first?”

Things went much better in Paris. Our AirBnB rental was right next to a direct train line to the airport and getting between the two places only took 40 minutes. Our host, Franck, had a lovely, tastefully decorated apartment on the edge of Le Marais, a district so packed with fine dining that we could have stayed there for months and eaten at a new place every night. We drank 5 euro glasses of wine at a lovely little cafe called Le Mesturat for hours, escargot-stuffed mushrooms, and wild boar in a wine reduction. It was heaven and I was very sad that we only had 22 hours in the city. Next time I’m in Paris I will almost certainly be looking for a place in Le Marais again – Franck, if his spare room is available.

Now, we’re on the plane back home – for real, this time. No timestamp changing funny business. In the next couple days/weeks I’ll be sorting my camera photos and updating almost every post I’ve made with fresh, high resolution photos from my actual camera. The smartphone does great for close-ups, but for a safari trip, nothing beats having an optical zoom. For everyone that’s been reading about our two week adventures – Guahari, Deylo, Ma’salaama, and Au Revoir! And thank you for taking an interest!

Soon after we left John and Endallah behind us, we were on our way back to Karatu for another bicycle ride – the one that we were supposed to have on the first day. Renatus, who we’d already met that first night, would be our guide. A relaxing three hour bicycle ride – on much nicer bicycles than we’d had in Dar es Salaam – was just what we needed. I asked Renatus how much the mountain bicycles, which were a Chinese brand I didn’t recognize, cost. He estimated $200 for them, which I thought was pretty good for their quality. Bicycle riding seemed to be common all over both the Dar and Northern regions, but ever single other person I saw was riding single-gear British style bicycles (I don’t know what they’re called, but they have a single large shaped piece of metal that flips down over the back wheel to act as a kickstand). Those, according to our guide, were $100. I wondered why people were so opposed to the better bicycle when they were only twice as expensive – it would be a good investment in my opinion. Renatus reminded me of the service required to keep a multi-gear bicycle with cantilever brakes running, in a dusty bumpy environment like Tanzania. Suddenly it made a lot more sense.

The highlight of the trip was stopping by a small local outdoor bar, where we got to sample some banana beer, brewed by the owner. For the equivalent of a nickel, Renatus was handed a warm liter of frothy malt-and-banana beverage in a plastic cup. We both tried it and it was…well, it was different. Apparently bananas ferment very easily, as this stuff was only 2% alcohol but had been made merely a few days earlier. It was filled with….solid material. The malt, I guess. It wasn’t terrible at all, in fact I could see myself developing a taste for it if we were in the region for awhile, but after a bumpy bicycle ride, I don’t think my stomach could have handled more than the 200ml or so it had. At lunch later with Renatus, for $2, I purchased professionally made bottle of “banana wine” which was 10% alcohol. That stuff packed a real kick – and I could still see the malt, finally ground, stuck to the bottom of the bottle. That stuff was great, and if only I could find it cold, I’d love to have more of it.

Me and my new “knife” style painting, and Tasha, its artist

Renatus also took us to a couple of shops, which I guess is to be expected for a tourist guide. We didn’t know that, though, thinking it was just going to be a bike ride + included beer sampling, so I hadn’t brought my wallet. All the shopkeepers seemed to know Renatus, though, and they all told us we could just pay him later. Christine and I ended up buying a couple paintings from a cooperative of young men artists. The two main styles are “tingatinga” or brush painting, and knife. No Swahili word for that, that they told us at least. I told Paul later that for future tours, he or Renatus should let the tourists know there’d be store stops so we’d know to bring our wallets. He said he didn’t know we’d be marketed to and seemed disconcerted and a bit embarrassed. I told him it was no big deal.

Paul picked us up after lunch and we headed to our fourth and final game drive region, Tarangire. This region was known for two things which immediately appeared for us – massive Baobob trees, and equally massive elephants.

They were everywhere. We saw more elephants over the next 24 hours in our two game drives than we’d seen in the entire trip, times ten. I’d estimate it at over 100, at least, usually in herds of at least 10-15. No more of the solitary elephants we saw leisurely wandering Ndutu – these were family units, almost always with a baby or two literally skipping and frolicking around a mother’s feet, a few oldsters with two foot long tusks, and most comically, the youngsters that were in the 3-4 year age group. These kids had tusks just starting to peep out from under their lips, only an inch or two long, which gave them the look of the bucktooth nerd stereotype as they trundled merrily along.

“lookit me, mom, I’m a nerdy baby elephant vampire!”

The baobobs were the other stars of the show, and Paul pointed out that the abundant water we saw in this area – more than any other – led to the trees, and the trees led to the proliferation of elephants. Everywhere we looked we saw massive, 5-meter wide trees – almost always with the telltale scrapes of tusks on them showing where the elephants tore off the succulent, water-filled bark and chowed down. Some of the trees had half their trunks missing, worn down by an excited herd like a gnawed carrot, and others had circular holes in their bases large enough for the Lion King’s Rafiki to build a shamanistic home in them.

Lions were the only predator we came across, including a single “tree lion” which Paul spotted from 300 meter distance. Apparently, it’s very uncommon to see them in trees anywhere but Lake Manyara, so we were lucky to glimpse one through binoculars. Overall, we saw 15 lions, usually in groups of 2-3. As usual, they were all napping – the show-off male from the edge of the Serengeti remains the only lion we saw doing anything but relaxing!

We also saw one more leopard, from a great distance – also napping. This was by the Silaleh swamp, an impressive multi-kilometer wide green swamp filled with Open-Bill storks and happy zebras, rolling about in the strong smelling mud at the edge.

And termite mounds. They were everywhere – I forgot to ask Paul, but I wonder now if they were also part of the Baobob ecosystem. More trees must certainly mean more animals that consume wood. Their mounds were massive, sometimes as much as 4 meters tall. Most were freestanding, but some of them were growing up right around trees, slowly and obviously killing them off as the termites bored away at them from inside their mounds. Seems like a logical to thing to do – if you’re a wood-eating creature, why make a freestanding mound when you could build right around a tree and gain shade, wind protection, and food right at your doorstep?

It wouldn’t be a Christine vacation without finding a cat to cuddle

I really enjoyed the camp we stayed at – it was a nice cross between the quiet solitude of Hugo Camp the first night, and the loud boisterousness of Nyani camp the second night. It was small, but had urinals and toilets, and even showers (filled with wasps nests, unfortunately). We had about a half dozen other campers, including one machine gun-toting Ranger who walked silently about the camp during dinner and breakfast, nodding politely at everyone.

What did we need protection from? Perhaps it would be nearsighted elephants. As I sat writing blog entries in the darkness of our tent with Christine sleeping in the other cot I began to hear crunching…and snuffling. Like a trombone hooked up to an air pump being slowly and gently crumpled. Dark shadows moved in the dim light from the almost-full moon above us. I nudged Christine – “hey, I think there are elephants eating in our camp.” She blearily rose and pressed her face to the screen of the tent door. “Where? What? I don’t see them…I’m gonna go outside and take a look.” I reminded her that Paul definitely didn’t want us to do anything that might spook or alarm the wild animals, and she grudgingly resumed pressing her face to the screen, peering around.

There was a crunch, a twang, and the tent vibrated. Christine leapt back, falling over my cot and jammed her fists to her mouth, whisper-screaming “ohmygodohmygodohmygoditsrightthere”

Seconds later, I saw it too – it’d be hard not to. An elephant’s foot had lightly brushed over the taut nylon ropes holding the tent covering down, which were pinned to the earth a meter from the tent itself. The dimness of the moon vanished and a huge shape passed in front of the door, no more than six inches from us. Christine told me that she had seen the eye itself, heavy lidded with long eyelashes, go right past her face. The ground shook again as the elephant took a few ponderous steps right past us, and in another second or two, was over by the bathrooms, grazing on a tree. Christine lay back down, shaking her head and muttering. In the resumed silence as the elephants moved off, I could hear her heart pounding.

I asked Paul casually the next day – “so, um, you told us that elephants have bad eyesight. What stops them from, y’know, stepping on tents? Accidentally, of course. Or tripping over their ropes.” His answer wasn’t particularly reassuring – “They know an unnatural thing and don’t go near it.” Someone tell that to the big fellow who was inches away from tripping and landing on us!

Small families of elephants like these were everywhere

The last – and definitely least – were the tsetse flies. They were unfortunately everywhere as well, and I have a few red welts on my hands (the only unprotected part of my body) to show for it. They itch like the dickens. Before I realized what they were, I photographed a massive, two-inch long one that had landed on Christine’s kitenga and was nosing about, looking for a weak spot to drill into. Paul later pointed out the flapping blue and black pieces of cloth, hung around every camp and picnic spot. They were drenched in a combination of tsetse fly attracting scent – and poison. The way most Americans have heard of this species of fly is because they carry the movie-famous “sleeping sickness” – but Paul assured me that only 1 in 1000 flies have it. Their bites, however, are still quite annoying and the government pays to put up those cloth banners all over Tarangire to try to keep their population down.

After our allotted 24 hours in the park, it was time to say goodbye to the elephants and baobobs and head back to Arusha. After we departed our last park, Paul frequented the healthy business of air filter cleaners for 15 minutes and a beefy auto mechanic blew out a termite mound’s worth of dust out of the truck’s filter. I was impressed, and asked Paul how often he replaced the filter in the truck. “After every tourist group,” he told me. Tanzania is a dusty country at this time of year.

We dropped Nico off at a bus stop at a crossroads near his hometown, Mto’mboo (which means “Mosquito River”) and we were immediately beset by trinket sellers who of course harassed us, but I was surprised to see they also went after Nico and Paul. I pressed our tip – $10 per day – into his palm carefully and discreetly. Paul bluntly told me this wasn’t a good area and to keep our money hidden.

Another hour later, and we were back in Arusha, staying at a curious place called, according to our program, “Lenana.” We really didn’t know what to make of it – it was a fine, modern looking home seemingly pressed against the back of a beer distributing warehouse (I saw their prices and advertisements tacked to the wall outside). A young woman, the daughter of the owner, greeted us – or rather Paul, since she didn’t speak any English. We took showers in the clean and tidy bathroom and I accidentally electrocuted my rump when it touched the water faucet – it seems that the electric water heater affixed to the shower head wasn’t properly grounded and the entire metal faucet/shower/handle system was coursing with electricity. Needless to say, between not having any English speaking receptionist to help tell us how to get to the Arusha airport the next day and the dangerous shower, I think I’ll be asking Endallah Tours to reconsider the usage of Lenana as the end-of-tour lodgings, at least in its current (pun intended) state.

We’re not so different